kindle editions of the Stone Dance...
After an interminable wait, ebook editions of The Standing Dead and The Third God are now available for kindle on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk and in ereader format at least here… No doubt these are available elsewhere…
The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that The Chosen is not yet available… bizarre indeed, but my editor assures me that these editions will be published at the end of September 2010. My publishers, Transworld, are also in talks with Apple so an edition on iPad etc should be available soon…
(writing on 9th of October 2010, the ebook version of The Chosen is available now)
Tags: disability, ebooks, internet, kindle, the stone dance of the chameleon
awesome! it’s here!
EBook versions! Yay!!!!
I can’t seem to figure out if I can read these versions in Stanza or iBooks in my iPad – it keeps telling me it needs a special “Kobo” application and I don’t want that. I’ll keep figuring though.
Why do I want ebook versions? Disability. I have extreme trouble holding a paperback book and turning the pages for long, especially the huge enormous type you seem to write! Also my eyes aren’t great and with the ebook versions I can increase the font size rather than squinting at the book – much easier.
Ricky
well, I’m afraid that, though I’m greatly in favour of ebooks, I don’t actually have an ebook reader and don’t really know anything much about the various formats out there. Was just discussing how irritating the lack of a universal ebook standard is… thus the reason I’ve not bought one yet – and also because I mostly read non-fiction and I’m not convinced that the books I read are yet available as ebooks… As for reading my books on your iPhone or iPad, my publishers have said that they’re in negotiations with Apple over their book list – and that this may that soon my books might appear on the iPad bookstore… we shall see…
I’m sorry about the size of my books *wry grin* though, of course, as you say, this disadvantage will disappear with an ebook edition… I suppose the other way to meet your needs would be an audiobook – but what poor schmuck would want to spend half his life reading my ‘magnum opus’ aloud…?! *grin*
Hey, I absolutely adore audiobooks! You should get Scott Brick to do them – he’s my favourite audiobook narrator :).
Overgeneralising here, but the biggest problems with audiobooks from a disability perspective (ie: for those of us who can’t access the dead tree books) are:
1. Navigation within the book is generally really hard. You can’t page back a few chapters without losing your place, you can’t check out the index or glossary or table of contents easily. This matters more for non-fiction books, and especially for reference books (imagine a recipe book which you had to read linearly from front to back!) but isn’t really a problem for fiction because mostly there’s no need.
2. Audiobooks are expensive to make, so books have to be fairly popular before audio editions are brought out. There are probably 10x as many books with ebook editions as with audio editions, especially recently because for any book published today the publishers already have the text and graphics in a digital form so publishing an ebook is a tiny cost whereas paying for an audiobook is still a big investment.
If I have the choice between audiobooks and ebooks and it’s a fiction title I’ll go for the audio every time. If It’s a nonfiction but linearly-read type of book like a biography or pop science book I’ll go for the audio. If it’s clearly a reference book I’ll go for an ebook … if I’m not sure I’ll see if I can get hold of both formats and switch and swap between them depending on which works best for a particular day/segment/situation.
Also, it takes me a lot less energy to listen to audiobooks than to read ebooks so they’re more relaxing and fun for me. That’s an artifact of my particular situation rather than a general thing, but I do spend a lot more time with audiobooks just because it’s low energy and my disability sucks the energy right out of me.
I hear what you’re saying about not having one particular format that’s good for everything, and that’s really something that sucks although converting between most of the existing formats isn’t really too hard. As a reader, DRM and other encryption/locking stuff is a huge pain too and tends to render locked books unusable after a certain amount of time because the company upgrades their format (and you only have the old one) or goes out of business (so their online server isn’t available) or you buy another reader and it doesn’t understand the same encryption format. I hope that like the VHS/Beta wars, it’ll settle down into at least a managably small number of versatile formats in a year or three. And like with DRM for music, I hope that unencrypted ebooks becomes the normal way to do things so customers have more control over using what they paid for.
I should probably hop off my soapbox now *grins*
Cheers,
r
soapbox oratory always welcome *grin* You’ve answered your own question: an audiobook version of the Stone Dance would be very expensive and so this is something that would have to be up to my publishers. My books are simply not popular enough for this to be likely – at least in the short term. It is interesting to hear things from your point of view. I regularly listen to In Touch that is a programme on BBC Radio 4 for people who are blind or partially sighted and have become aware of just how much freedom the new technologies are giving to people who, before, were limited to the small proportion of texts that were translated into brail and other facilitative formats… This – and some friends of mine who couldn’t face tackling my books in their papery incarnation – had already made me desire to have audiobook versions of the Stone Dance available. Thus my interest in how it is that you can access them through an ebook format – I’m assuming that what you do is get your iPhone (or whatever device you’re using) to read it out to you… right?
Incidentally, one of the aspects of ebooks that most attracts me is the vastly more powerful options there are for navigation within and outwith texts. Although many people seem to believe that the paper book as machine is already perfect, I feel that though it is mostly so, it is not entirely so. Paper books are limited by being hand-operated machines – and accessing notes (at the end of chapters, or at the end of the core text) is often difficult – indices are often not complete enough and, even if they are, they’re a bother to access. And let’s not even mention access across books: atlases, dictionaries etc… So it does seem to me that for readers, even those without disability, access to a text could be greatly improved by hyperlinking etc… For someone like yourself, the failings of the paper book are even more profound…
The iPhone/iPod Touch/iPads can read out their books to blind users, yes, via the screen reader that allows blind users to access all of the device’s functions. Many other devices or ebook software (eg on a PC or Mac) either won’t do this at all or will only do it if the publisher specifically allows it (Kindle is in this position) and most publishers won’t and so the accessibility of the ebook is then zero for people who need text-to-speech functions. The reason behind this is publishers getting paranoid about DRM and that allowing the books to be available for accessibility software (like a screen reader) is a “security risk”. I won’t give you my whole DRM rant as I’m sure you know both sides of the argument, but this particular side-effect of DRM – making perfectly good ebooks inaccessible to disabled users who can’t access the paper version either – makes me blind with fury (pun not indended!).
Just a note: I’m not blind myself. I can actually read regular print books when I try, though large print is vastly easier for my eyes. My biggest problem with paper books, especially hardbacks or tomes like you write (or large print books which are inevitable bigger), is the weight of the book and holding the damm things because my disability (it’s called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I’ll faint in surprise if you’ve heard of it!) saps my energy quickly so my stamina sucks. I also have a not-very-related injury that means I can’t use my right wrist much which exacerbates the problem.
The iPad itself isn’t particularly light, but I have worked out a bunch of ways to balance or mount it so I’m not holding its weight and also I don’t have to turn the pages myself – I just tap the screen to turn the page or turn on auto-scroll and have it scroll for me. Plus with an ebook, I can set it to use very large print and a light-on-dark colour screen which makes things MUCH easier on my eyes.
I know a lot about accessibility for all sorts of disabilties though because it interests me and my ATMac website is a great excuse to explore almost any area of accessibility that I want to!
About options for navigating and searching within ebooks I heartily agree, although again the software that enforces DRM often locks this stuff down because they are stupid/ignorant. There is an ebook format called DAISY which is used pretty much exclusively by print-disabled people (print disabled = blind, dyslexic, or otherwise unable to hold/manipulate/read standard print books for any reason) at the moment which is a brilliant standard. It lets you divide up the book in any way you want (eg chapters, sub-chapters, pages, etc.), and provide text or audio or synchronised text-and-audio – whichever you choose. Most audio libraries serving the print disabled now use DAISY formats for both their audiobooks and ebooks, which solves the navigation-within-audiobooks problem I wrote about a few messages up. It’s truly the most flexible and useful format in terms of being provided with multiple levels of navigation (I think there’s up to 5 or 6 levels?) and being suitable for reference materials. Unfortunately, because DAISY is quite a specialised format at the moment we’re back to having the problem of only a small number of ebooks being available in this format :/
Actually there’s quite a large “grey” community of blind and print-disabled users who swap DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks in whatever format is available to them. Because there’s so many e/audio books which have been created but are unusable because of DRM, or are only available in certain regions because of the way publishers sell licences, this can be the only way to get access to a certain text. Technically it’s not legal, but if its the only way you can get hold of an accessible copy of a text that any able-bodied person could buy at the shop then I don’t find it to be immoral. And because the print-disabled community is such a small proportion of readers overall, and generally a financially disadvantaged proportion at that, I doubt it has much effect on author’s incomes. As an Aussie I must say it’s incredibly frustrating to see that a book’s available on (say) audible.com and then log in and just see that page that says the book’s not available in my area … and it happens a lot with audiobooks and ebooks. We definitely need a new book licensing paradigm that doesn’t constrain internet purchasing because of the address on our credit cards!
I have a funny story for you too, but I think it would be better suited to email than here – could you drop me a line if it suits you?
Cheers,
r
apologies for not having got to this earlier, Ricky, at the time I was defeated by the sheer volume of your response – wonderfully complete as it is. I don’t think what you are doing is the least immoral. I personally absolve you of any piracy you want to make of my books – though I suppose my publishers might be the ones who would feel defrauded. Like most writers, my primary objective is to get my stuff read – that’s why I wrote it – and nothing frustrates me more than all this kind of formats rubbish that is intended to serve corporations and certainly not the reader. I too get most irritated by the application of national borders to the naturally borderless internet. I have great hopes for the freedom that texts might find on the internet… of course some means will have to be found to compensate writers – otherwise new books will not be written. No doubt it will get messy during the transition to a new paradigm – so be it…!
For your reading pleasure, and amazingly on-topic, coming from me: link.
fascinating… and it seems to me to be clearly true… Strange to have been aware of all the aspects of this and then to have it grouped together this way so that you end up seeing it all in a completely new way…
Your books aren’t available in India. They are probably supposed to be, but god knows I’ve tried to locate them in every bookshop in town. I hope The Chosen becomes available in ereader format soon. :)
hmmm… I imagine they should be… I will ask me editor. As for an ereader version of The Chosen, it should be available at the end of September… Please let me know how you get on with finding a copy…
Turns out I couldn’t find one after all. I was about to order a copy off amazon if I didn’t see it here today.
I don’t understand… what’s the problem, Kazi?
Yes I do, me and my faithful Sony PRS-300, we just love each other so so so muuuch. I mean, let’s face it: your books are nothing short of works of genius, but so unwieldy…
I have a sort of a fetish for dead-tree versions of books. I love to smell them. I can read a 1000-page book, paperback edition, without creasing its spine. But nothing compares to the ease of going on the subway with a library in my pocket (e.g.: I have Freud’s complete works in there) and not having to worry about bending a page, or staining it, or whatnot…
Correct, as always, I just saw this after replying to you. *grin*
I too have a fetish for dead-tree versions of books, but that does not mean that I am not quite passionate about the idea of electronic books – seems to me that it is possible to separate the aesthetics of books as texts from their papery shrouds… And, of course, there will be many freedoms that come from this innovation… I’m not sure why I’ve not got one yet – perhaps it is because most of the books I read are obscure academic treatises and I simply don’t imagine they are available yet as ebooks – though your comments about Freud might suggest otherwise…
Shall I say that you just have to search in the right places? *smirk*
*narrow eyed look* I don’t think you’d better say that… I might take it to be cheek…… *grin*
Horray! Finally!
why are you so keen on ebook versions? Do you read a lot of books in this way? I’ve still not got one – though I’m all for it… Not entirely convinced by the idea of amazon’s kindle… and the iPad seems overkill… so biding my time before committing…
have just asked on facebook if anyone knows about ebooks in Portuguese… no doubt you know ALL about it! *grin*